Charges against colonel couldn't come at a worse time for military
By Don Martin
Canwest News Service
February 12, 2010
It shouldn't be happening because the uniform isn't on trial, but morale is free-falling inside Canadian Forces Base Trenton after the base commander was charged with double murders and a pair of sexual assaults.
The stain on the one is, wrongly, spreading to the many.
"Everyone in the Canadian Forces will tell you officially that it won't harm morale, but how couldn't it?" confided a senior officer in the reserves. "People are going to feel shocked, and I expect that many folks, particularly in the Trenton area, are going to be looking at people in military uniforms a little differently as this plays out. This can't be good for morale."
He is, sadly, correct.
Col. Russell Williams is entitled to the judicial presumption of innocence, but he can only be cleared after a prolonged media frenzy of a trial fixated on someone whose heinous crimes are worsened, if that's possible, by his lofty standing in the Canadian Forces.
Questions will swirl about how a man accused of such crimes could have been promoted to a rank where he mingled with the defence minister and piloted prime ministers or governors general on Challenger jets.
Assault victims are already coming forward to document the horror they allegedly experienced in cringing detail. Websites are filling with tributes for the murder victims and venomous outrage aimed at the accused.
And all this is erupting before a single shred of what will undoubtedly be horrific evidence in an expanding investigation is put before the courts of law and public opinion.
One retired senior officer with numerous contacts inside the chain of command was spitting fury at the situation confronting soldiers on Tuesday.
"The commander they entrusted with their lives stands accused of taking them. There is no greater breach of trust," he fumed.
Ironically, this blow strikes a military firing on all cylinders and arguably at the peak of its deployment power.
Lt.-Gen. Andrew Leslie, commander of land forces, was practically bursting his brass buttons late last week when we chatted over coffee in an Ottawa restaurant.
He's a general with a no-nonsense edginess who relishes in telling stories about his most aggressive officers and thinks a busy military is a happy fighting force.
By that measure, his army is a very, very happy place.
"I have never seen the army more active than it is right now," he told me.
His regular 2,500-soldier deployment in Kandahar is preparing to assist the British and Americans in a major Taliban clear out this week. He's got 3,000 soldiers in the California desert training in mock Afghanistan conditions for a battlefield they'll be fighting on later this year. There are 4,000 soldiers in the Vancouver area backstopping RCMP for 2010 Winter Olympics security. There are 1,500 army soldiers in Haiti helping earthquake survivors. And the northern Rangers are more active than ever patrolling the Arctic.
Without an infusion of 2,500 regular soldiers in the last few years, the army would be stretched beyond its deployment capacity, he said.
"Morale is really high even though everyone is literally working their butts off," Leslie said. "The respect and support they enjoy from Canadians is unprecedented in my 30 years wearing army green."
The proof of an energized army comes every time he addresses troops poised to head overseas for the dangers of Afghanistan. Leslie offers them a last-minute chance to refuse the assignment without losing face.
"I've probably asked that question to 25,000 soldiers and only had one bow out. His excuse was that his wife just found out his girlfriend was pregnant," he said with a grin. Gosh, I couldn't dream up a better excuse to flee for the relative safety of Kandahar battlefields if confronted by that scenario.
Contacted for a followup on Tuesday to discuss the impact of Williams' arrest on soldier morale, Leslie not surprisingly backs his soldiers.
"I am personally shocked and appalled, but morale is and will remain high in the army."
Here's hoping he's right. If the charges against Williams stick, it's only evidence of a single deranged individual and not a uniform stain on Canadian soldiers who deserve only our respect.
dmartincanwest.com
© Copyright (c) The Edmonton Journal
Showing posts with label edmonton journal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label edmonton journal. Show all posts
Friday, February 12, 2010
Ont. killings not linked to Halifax cold cases
Police yet to share evidence
By Glenn Johnson
Canwest News Service
February 12, 2010
There is no evidence to suggest any connection with cold cases in Halifax and recent homicides in Ontario, Halifax police said Thursday.
"That is exactly correct," said Halifax Regional Police Const. Brian Palmeter.
Palmeter said his force received a number of calls asking whether there was any connection with any cold cases there because Col. Russell Williams had served at CFB Shearwater, near Halifax. Other media inquiries about unsolved homicides have been made in other cities where Williams was also stationed with the Canadian Forces, including Manitoba.
Palmeter said the Halifax and Ontario officers have not discussed any evidence in the specific cases.
Palmeter said the three cold cases in Halifax involved the deaths of young women, including one in January of 1992 and another in late November, 1994. But Palmeter said there is no evidence Williams was in the area during those times.
"We were getting a lot of calls trying to connect him to these files and I said we had no information. We don't even know that this guy was here when these happened."
Palmeter said any speculation is premature because the police forces are not at the point where any specific evidence has been shared about cases. "We're not saying there is not a conceivable possibility -- but we haven't been given any evidence that suggests there is any connection with our files at this time."
© Copyright (c) The Edmonton Journal
By Glenn Johnson
Canwest News Service
February 12, 2010
There is no evidence to suggest any connection with cold cases in Halifax and recent homicides in Ontario, Halifax police said Thursday.
"That is exactly correct," said Halifax Regional Police Const. Brian Palmeter.
Palmeter said his force received a number of calls asking whether there was any connection with any cold cases there because Col. Russell Williams had served at CFB Shearwater, near Halifax. Other media inquiries about unsolved homicides have been made in other cities where Williams was also stationed with the Canadian Forces, including Manitoba.
Palmeter said the Halifax and Ontario officers have not discussed any evidence in the specific cases.
Palmeter said the three cold cases in Halifax involved the deaths of young women, including one in January of 1992 and another in late November, 1994. But Palmeter said there is no evidence Williams was in the area during those times.
"We were getting a lot of calls trying to connect him to these files and I said we had no information. We don't even know that this guy was here when these happened."
Palmeter said any speculation is premature because the police forces are not at the point where any specific evidence has been shared about cases. "We're not saying there is not a conceivable possibility -- but we haven't been given any evidence that suggests there is any connection with our files at this time."
© Copyright (c) The Edmonton Journal
Serial killers live double lives, expert says
Sociopaths able to keep criminal activities secret by assuming respected roles in community
By Sharon Kirkey
Canwest News Service
February 12, 2010
Elliott Leyton says it surprises him how many people think it would be difficult for a killer to conceal his crimes from those closest to him.
Duplicity and compartmentalization are easy for a lot of people, he says, especially when they're doing something so horrific.
Serial killers are sociopaths, and have no feelings of guilt or remorse for those they harm. "So they're not being torn apart," says Leyton, a Canadian anthropologist and expert on the psychology of multiple killers.
"If you strangled somebody in a fit of rage, you wouldn't be able to cope with it. You'd either kill yourself or turn yourself in. The thought of it would be just utterly overwhelming to you," Leyton says. "You would at some point be able to see what you've done -- you've killed a human being."
But serial killers don't see others as human beings, he says, only tools or toys to be used.
"So they have no guilt, no remorse, no feelings of having done something wrong," Leyton says. "There's just more triumph."
If police and a Crown prosecutor can prove the startling allegations of murder and rape facing Col. Russell Williams, the air force commander charged with killing two women and sexually assaulting two others, the question many will be asking is: How could he have hidden his dark secret from his wife?
For serial murderers such as Robert Pickton, one of Canada's most prolific killers, secrets can be easy to hide. Convicted in 2007 of the murder of six women who disappeared from Vancouver's downtown eastside, Pickton was a loner, living on a Port Coquitlam, B.C., pig farm "in the middle of nowhere," says Mike Arntfield, professor of information and media studies at the University of Western Ontario in London, and a 10-year police veteran. "It's not difficult for him to keep his activities a secret."
But there are cases of killers living duplicitous, dichotomous double lives, he says, who "feign normality as this soccer dad and loving husband, and then they have this deep dark secret."
Dennis Rader, the so-called BTK ( "bind, torture and kill") strangler, murdered 10 people around Wichita, Kan., between 1974 and 1991 before he was caught. Rader was a bylaw officer and father of two, a Cub Scout leader and an elder in his Lutheran Church.
Leyton says serial killers all live double lives "and do so with ease."
Williams was an elite pilot, a "shining bright star" of the military, who rose through the ranks during his 23-year career to fly the prime minister and Governor General across Canada and overseas in one of four Canadian Forces Challenger jets.
He and his wife, Mary Elizabeth Harriman, have a cottage in Tweed, Ont., as well as a newly built home in Ottawa, where Harriman works for the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada. The two have no children.
They have been a couple since at least 1991, the year a search of old city directories shows they were sharing the same apartment in Portage la Prairie, Man., where Williams was then working as a flying instructor at the Canadian Forces Flying Training School.
"We often wrestle with how they do it, the double life. Why they stay with someone to whom they do not reveal," says Dr. Frank Farley, a psychologist at Temple University in Philadelphia and past president of the American Psychological Association.
The relationship can provide a legitimacy, a cover, says Farley, a native of Edmonton. But it can also provide crucial emotional stability in an otherwise unstable, violent and risky life, a psychological space the killer can step into. "That has survival value for him, surviving in his head when he's doing these heinous other things to women.
"He can red-line that relationship with her, keep it intact, compartmentalize it."
Farley stressed he can only speculate on the Williams case. But as many as 20 per cent of men state in anonymous surveys that they have had affairs. "If we can maintain this kind of dual lives, if many people can do it in ordinary life, we shouldn't be surprised that some people are able to maintain it at a more extreme level."
© Copyright (c) The Edmonton Journal
By Sharon Kirkey
Canwest News Service
February 12, 2010
Elliott Leyton says it surprises him how many people think it would be difficult for a killer to conceal his crimes from those closest to him.
Duplicity and compartmentalization are easy for a lot of people, he says, especially when they're doing something so horrific.
Serial killers are sociopaths, and have no feelings of guilt or remorse for those they harm. "So they're not being torn apart," says Leyton, a Canadian anthropologist and expert on the psychology of multiple killers.
"If you strangled somebody in a fit of rage, you wouldn't be able to cope with it. You'd either kill yourself or turn yourself in. The thought of it would be just utterly overwhelming to you," Leyton says. "You would at some point be able to see what you've done -- you've killed a human being."
But serial killers don't see others as human beings, he says, only tools or toys to be used.
"So they have no guilt, no remorse, no feelings of having done something wrong," Leyton says. "There's just more triumph."
If police and a Crown prosecutor can prove the startling allegations of murder and rape facing Col. Russell Williams, the air force commander charged with killing two women and sexually assaulting two others, the question many will be asking is: How could he have hidden his dark secret from his wife?
For serial murderers such as Robert Pickton, one of Canada's most prolific killers, secrets can be easy to hide. Convicted in 2007 of the murder of six women who disappeared from Vancouver's downtown eastside, Pickton was a loner, living on a Port Coquitlam, B.C., pig farm "in the middle of nowhere," says Mike Arntfield, professor of information and media studies at the University of Western Ontario in London, and a 10-year police veteran. "It's not difficult for him to keep his activities a secret."
But there are cases of killers living duplicitous, dichotomous double lives, he says, who "feign normality as this soccer dad and loving husband, and then they have this deep dark secret."
Dennis Rader, the so-called BTK ( "bind, torture and kill") strangler, murdered 10 people around Wichita, Kan., between 1974 and 1991 before he was caught. Rader was a bylaw officer and father of two, a Cub Scout leader and an elder in his Lutheran Church.
Leyton says serial killers all live double lives "and do so with ease."
Williams was an elite pilot, a "shining bright star" of the military, who rose through the ranks during his 23-year career to fly the prime minister and Governor General across Canada and overseas in one of four Canadian Forces Challenger jets.
He and his wife, Mary Elizabeth Harriman, have a cottage in Tweed, Ont., as well as a newly built home in Ottawa, where Harriman works for the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada. The two have no children.
They have been a couple since at least 1991, the year a search of old city directories shows they were sharing the same apartment in Portage la Prairie, Man., where Williams was then working as a flying instructor at the Canadian Forces Flying Training School.
"We often wrestle with how they do it, the double life. Why they stay with someone to whom they do not reveal," says Dr. Frank Farley, a psychologist at Temple University in Philadelphia and past president of the American Psychological Association.
The relationship can provide a legitimacy, a cover, says Farley, a native of Edmonton. But it can also provide crucial emotional stability in an otherwise unstable, violent and risky life, a psychological space the killer can step into. "That has survival value for him, surviving in his head when he's doing these heinous other things to women.
"He can red-line that relationship with her, keep it intact, compartmentalize it."
Farley stressed he can only speculate on the Williams case. But as many as 20 per cent of men state in anonymous surveys that they have had affairs. "If we can maintain this kind of dual lives, if many people can do it in ordinary life, we shouldn't be surprised that some people are able to maintain it at a more extreme level."
© Copyright (c) The Edmonton Journal
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